


Kiss Me Cake

by klepto_maniac0



Series: Heroes All [7]
Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Baking, F/M, Gen, baking mishaps, internal agony, this is why you should have the dating talk IRL asap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 00:05:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17776769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/klepto_maniac0/pseuds/klepto_maniac0
Summary: Quistis wonders what kind of baked good says, “Thanks for all the sex, but don’t get any ideas”.





	Kiss Me Cake

 

One early spring day, Quistis went to the cafeteria and found Rinoa in deep, serious discussion with the head cafeteria lady. Curious, she came over and caught the tail end of the conversation, which was Rinoa saying, “Well, darn. Thanks anyway!”

 

“What was that about?” Quistis asked Rinoa, startling the younger woman and making her spin about. 

 

“Quistis! Ack! Don’t scare me like that!” Giving Quistis a friendly mock-slap on the arm, Rinoa scolded, “I thought you were Squall. You both walk like cats.”

 

“Thank you. And what exactly are you hiding from Squall that involves the cafeteria?”

 

“I’m making kiss-cakes,” said Rinoa, her mouth twisting. “Or at least, I was trying to. Dipti said nobody’s allowed in the kitchen except the staff for safety reasons.”

 

Quistis blinked, looking at Rinoa in a new light. “You can make kiss-cakes?”

 

“Yeah, my old cook showed me,” said Rinoa, nodding. “Mrs. Staffe was a real kitchen witch and practically raised me. She used to try to make me make kiss-cakes for my old man, and one year I made them really bitter just because.” She laughed, only a little melancholy at the thought of her late father, and said, “The ones I’ll make for Squall will be way nicer.”

 

“I had no idea anyone could make kiss-cakes by hand,” said Quistis, thinking of the delicate sandwich-like cookies that always came around in the spring. They were a staple of the annual Spring Moon Festival, which had to do only very loosely with the moon: it had more to do with a well-known tragedy that was the basis for countless works of fiction and the folkloric reasons for the Lunar Cry. But like all holidays, all manner of paraphernalia and accessories had popped up over the years, so even though there was nothing in the original story of Iwate and Terrano about kiss-cakes (in fact, a major aspect of their sad love was that they’d never kissed at all), here kiss-cakes were. 

 

Now thanks to her fan club, Quistis had always found herself with more kiss-cakes than she knew what to do with, and she was always leery of eating them anyway; it would be too easy for someone to put something questionable in there, if not actually harmful. Plus picking one kiss-cake to eat implied she was favoring the sender, which presented its own set of problems. So generally Quistis didn’t think much about kiss-cakes except as store-bought nuisances packed with way too much sugar. 

 

“They’re not really hard, just fiddly,” said Rinoa with an air of expertise. Then she clapped her hands. “Oh! I know! I’ll ask Zell!”

 

“What does Zell have to do with this?”

 

“Zell’s mom lives in Balamb and has a kitchen! Maybe she’ll let me use it if I ask really, really nicely.”

 

“Mrs. Dincht likes you. I’m sure you could ask normal-nicely and she’ll be happy to let you.” A flicker of blonde coming up fast caught Quistis’s eye and she turned to see the man himself approaching, his eyes keened on the case where the hot dogs were or were not, depending on the day. “Oh, you can ask now.”

 

Rinoa pounced immediately, which made Quistis chuckle as she completed her walk to the cafeteria counter and picked her usual breakfast of coffee and a bagel. Even here there were signs of the upcoming Spring Moon Festival: the usual paper cups had been replaced with pink ones stamped with cherry petals and Quistis caught a whiff of sweet baking coming out of the cafeteria kitchen. Once again she mused on Rinoa’s ability to make kiss-cakes. The Garden ladies made something similar for all the students, but theirs were more like dipped marshmallows or heavy brownies rather than the airy, nearly too fragile confections that kiss-cakes were supposed to be. Without meaning to, Quistis started thinking about what kind of cakes could made from the kisses she had been getting lately and nearly burst out laughing. Light, sweet, and chaste, they were not.

 

_“…Kiss-cakes are usually exchanged between lovers. Oh god. Is Seifer going to expect a kiss-cake from me?”_

 

They hadn’t had that talk yet. Or any talks yet. In fact, they both avoided them out of unspoken agreement that it would make things super weird, especially since they saw each other so infrequently and didn’t exactly go on dates when they were together. Quistis chewed her lip, wondering if there was any kind of baked good that said, “Thanks for all the sex, but don’t get any ideas”. 

 

“Yeah,” said Zell, so perfectly timed with her thought that Quistis nearly cringed. But he was actually saying, “Ma always makes a bunch and sends ‘em out to my cousins and all, so she’s got everything you’ll need.”

 

“Hooray!” Said Rinoa, relieved and excited. 

 

Cousins? Hmm…

 

_“So kiss-cakes can be given to people who aren’t lovers.”_

 

That made up her mind at once. Turning around and looking at Rinoa and Zell, Quistis asked, “Can I come too? I’d love to learn how to bake something.”

 

“Ohhh?” At once Rinoa looked very sly, a grin creeping around her lips. “Baking for anyone special?”

 

“I was thinking our entire group,” said Quistis. When Rinoa failed to look convinced, Quistis said, “Well, you can give kiss-cakes to family members too, right?”

 

“Right,” said Zell with a nod, being a wonderful unwitting accomplice. “Well, I’m free for the rest of the day. Wanna go to Ma’s after breakfast, then?”

 

“Sure,” said Rinoa, nodding happily. She looked a little misty-eyed for some reason, which momentarily mystified Quistis until she realized that Rinoa was just as much an orphan as the rest of them were now: their little friend group was her new family too. Perhaps baking for the entire group didn’t have to be just a smokescreen. 

 

“I’m in the middle of my break,” said Quistis with a bit of a smile. “Sounds like a plan.”

 

/\/\/\

 

Zell had called ahead, so by the time the three of them came down to Ma Dincht’s, she had set out everything needed for kiss-cakes, even separating them into stations for each person. Quistis was surprised at how few materials there seemed to be, especially since her impression of kiss-cakes was that they were fragile and therefore complicated. She quickly realized her impression was correct, starting with Ma rattling off instructions with the ease of a master and the absolutely dumbfounding terminology of a professor.

 

“First we’re going to separate the eggs…”

 

_“Well obviously, no one eats the shells… But does she mean something else, then?”_

 

“Then we’re going to sift the almond flour—”

 

_“Almond flour? You can make flour out of almonds? And what’s ‘sifting’? I’m not sure that’s a real word…”_

 

“—and then we’re going to fold everything but without knocking the air out of it—”

 

_“Folding what? Knocking the air out of what?”_

 

Bewildered, Quistis nevertheless listened intently and nodded like she knew what was going on. Her survival in the field had often depended on faking confidence until either completion or success. Baking was no doubt the same sort of thing.  

 

They started with the simple task of cracking eggs. Immediately Quistis was flummoxed, because… She didn’t know how to.

 

“You gotta hit it harder than that,” said Zell, who was eyeing Quistis’s gingery taps on the kitchen table with amused confusion. 

 

“Yeah, like this,” said Rinoa, who had cracked four eggs already and now demonstrated with a fifth. Quistis tried to mimic Rinoa’s decisive strike and gasped as the egg smashed all over Ma Dincht’s clean kitchen table. But before she could do anything more, Ma swiped up the mess with a wet towel like she’d been waiting for failure. 

 

“It’s alright, dear, just try again,” said Ma with a patient smile. Handing Quistis one of the bowls that she’d set out for the eggs, she said, “Aim for the edge, there. You might find it easier.”

 

“Maybe,” said Quistis valiantly, trying not to get discouraged because of an egg. But the bowl method turned out to be even less successful and Quistis swore as half the egg spilled into the bowl, half slopped onto the table, and worst of all, the yolk split into a runny mess that made the entire thing even more unusable. She tried not to cringe as she heard a barely perceptible sigh from Ma Dincht and stunned silence from both Zell and Rinoa. 

 

The rest of baking was marred by similar disasters. Quistis had been on some pretty terrible missions before, ones where everything except a teammate dying had happened, and baking kiss-cakes was giving her flashbacks. And at least with missions, she knew what was going wrong or about to go wrong—there was no such foreknowledge with baking. Every step of the way, Zell or Ma or Rinoa had to stop Quistis from doing something that would destroy her amateur efforts, and by the time Quistis actually got to mixing everything, she was ready to scream if she heard one more person go “Wait!” one more time. 

 

“It’s okay,” said Zell, seeing the look on Quistis’s face. “The first time I baked, I put in baking soda instead of baking powder and everything tasted real bad.”

 

“Yeah,” said Rinoa, nodding. “I put salt instead of sugar in the first time I made cookies. It’s practically tradition to make something awful your first time!”

 

_“But I don’t want to give Seifer something awful,”_  thought Quistis with the corner of her mind that wasn’t fretting about the elusive, maddening technique of ‘folding’. How did one fold something that wasn’t stiff? Why wasn’t this called ‘slopping’ or ‘splatting’ or something even a bit more indicative of what was actually happening? And why had she ever thought that making a stupid kiss-cake was even a good idea in the first place? She didn’t know how to bake! She didn’t even know how to cook! What was she doing in a kitchen, covered in powder with her hair sticking to her face and tickling her nose, when she could be doing something useful?

 

_“I’m using a free day on this idiocy, and I could be back at the Garden training, or helping Xu with admin, or even sleeping. And if Seifer was around, I could think of plenty of things to do with him too, but here I am failing at some sad substandard excuse for a corporate creation to sell cakes and candy, and he won’t even eat it, I know he won’t, I don’t even eat them so why would he, especially when they’re going to look so awful—”_

 

“It’s just a cookie, Quistis,” said Rinoa softly, sounding so hesitant that Quistis realized she had to look absolutely dreadful. 

 

“I know,” said Quistis, forcibly modulating her voice to something lighter than she felt. “I’m just not used to not doing things well.”

 

_“I should just throw these in the trash right now and spare him the taste of them. And the look of them. He’s going to think I’m making fun of him by giving him such horrible things.”_

 

“Then you’re not trying stuff that’s hard enough, or learning anything new,” said Zell, who had deftly spatulated all his mixture into an icing bag and was expertly squeezing out uniform circles of kiss-cake batter onto a parchment-covered baking sheet. At some point he had put dye into his mixture, so the resultant circles were rather artistic swirls of red and yellow that looked like marble. Envy nearly made Quistis choke. 

 

“Worse comes to worst, they’ll just be a test batch,” said Ma Dincht, which made Quistis’s throat lock up in truth. 

 

“I’ll replace the wasted supplies,” she said, but Ma Dincht tut-tutted and pulled a strand of troublesome hair away from Quistis’s mouth.

 

“It’s just baking. Experiments happen.” Nodding at Quistis’s mixture, she asked, “Do you want to put any color in?”

 

“No, I should keep it simple…”

 

“Then we’ll go nuts on the filling,” said Rinoa, which made Quistis laugh with false cheer. God. Kiss-cakes always had a filling, didn’t they?

 

Feeling even more lost, Quistis made herself finish mixing and then getting the batter into circle-ish blobs on a cookie sheet. Then she excused herself, begging a a need of fresh air and went out to sit in Ma’s tiny, fragrant back garden. She wasn’t sure when she’d sudden started thinking of the stupid kiss-cakes as being a metaphor for her and Seifer, but it seemed like every mistake was an omen of ill tidings. The icing sugar explosion was how they ended up sniping at each other so much. The ruined eggs were how they butted heads on mutual missions. The clumsy folding was how they were never going to be anything other than a time-killing fling because even now, after everything they’d gone through, they didn’t really mix.

 

_“And the more I think about it, I’m sure he hasn’t even thought about me. He certainly wouldn’t go to all this trouble.”_

 

She should have been angry. Instead Quistis swallowed past the jagged lump in her throat and tried hard not to cry. She allowed herself half a minute of misery before taking a deep breath and squaring her shoulders. She’d certainly gotten herself into a mess, alright, but she would be damned if she wouldn’t see it through.

 

Besides, they were cookies. And she refused to be defeated by cookies. 

 

When Quistis went back inside, Zell and Ma were tapping pans of cookie batter and chatting amongst themselves. Rinoa was standing at the counter with a large block of dark chocolate and a bottle of cream, and she held both out at Quistis. 

 

“Usually people put buttercream in kiss-cakes, but I got the feeling you were done with separating eggs,” said Rinoa, which made Quistis laugh a little. “So we’re going to do ganache.”

 

“What’s ganache?”

 

“It’s like chocolate frosting, but better.”

 

“I do like chocolate,” Quistis admitted. As Rinoa handed her a knife to cut up the block of chocolate with, Quistis mused on the best chocolate she’d ever had, which had been a mug of hot cocoa in Dollet after a freak snowstorm had locked the harbor. In a very tiny café, alone in the early morning, young SeeD Quistis had savored a steaming, creamy, smooth and thick hot cocoa that was the richest thing she’d ever tasted—not sweet, but aromatic and complex. There’d been an aftertaste of smoked chili pepper too, something Quistis had never found in any other cup of hot cocoa since though she always looked in every restaurant she had the chance to go to. Hmm. 

 

_“Well… I guess I could try it now. If it turns out horrible, I can just eat the whole bowl and spare everyone else. I’ll always eat chocolate.”_

 

So under Rinoa’s direction and eye, Quistis simmered the cream over the stove, added the chunks of chocolate, and then stirred everything together until it came together in a smooth glossy whole. It was definitely much easier than whatever Zell and his Ma were doing at the kitchen table, which involved skinning oranges and something called ‘pith'. Confidence recovering, Quistis asked Rinoa to find something spicy, and while Rinoa seemed nonplussed, she willingly hunted around Ma’s kitchen until she came up with an entire box of hot sauces. Quistis smelled each one until she found something that reminded her of that Dollet mug and then added a few dashes to the chocolate. She missed Rinoa’s intense look of concentration at the chocolate pot: had she spotted her friend’s expression, Quistis would have sworn Rinoa was sternly telling the chocolate to behave. 

 

Afterwards, they waited for everything to cool. Over strong black tea and cookies that Ma Dincht had made much earlier that morning, Quistis felt more balanced towards her baking blunders. Sure, she wasn’t going to have made perfect kiss-cakes the first time around: how silly she was to even expect to, considering she’d never baked so much as a chocolate chip cookie before. Not to mention that kiss-cakes were difficult and fiddly, what with all their careful precise instructions and hurrying and waiting in turns. She certainly had a new appreciation for the technique! By the time the cookie parts of the cakes were done baking, Quistis felt ridiculous for being so upset before, as well as quietly cognizant of the fact that tackling a new task on a light breakfast was probably a bad idea. 

 

And then she saw the actual cookies.

 

Zell’s looked fine. Their faint red and yellow marbling had turned out quite nicely and they were as smooth on top as a professional kiss-cake from a store. Rinoa had dyed her kiss-cake batter multiple dark colors and they looked like perfect circles of starry night. 

 

But despite all the supervision, Quistis’s cakes had cracked like her smashed eggshells from before, and oozed out from the bottom in brownish disks that looked like they'd had died inglorious, humiliating deaths. None of them were the same size. Few of them were even round. 

 

The silence around the table was so heavy that eventually when Quistis sighed, everyone burst into chatter all at once. 

 

“It’s alright, these things happen—”

 

“We can just cut the bits off—”

 

“I bet they taste great,” said Zell, and immediately shoved one of the hot, oven-fresh cookies into his mouth. At once his face reddened in pain and everyone gasped in horror, but he immediately picked up another misshapen cookie and stuck it in his mouth too.

 

“Let them cool down!” Ma scolded, but Zell shook his head and resolutely ate another. 

 

“Vey’re ffo deliffuf! Ah can’ftop m’ff!”

 

“And stop going so fast!” Said Ma, smacking Zell’s hand away as he reached for yet another cookie. The pugnacious look on his face made Quistis start to giggle and then laugh outright as Zell and his mother tussled over her misshapen confections. Zell’s superior speed eventually won out and his cheeks soon reached a capacity a chipmunk would have envied. 

 

“You are going to have a serious stomachache,” said Rinoa to Zell, but picked up another of Quistis’s cookies and ate it as well. Quistis heard a loud crunch that kiss-cakes definitely were not supposed to have, but Rinoa ate the entire thing too, huffing only a little to cool it down. She looked contemplative. 

 

“It’s actually not that bad,” she said to Quistis. “Burnt sugar’s a thing that’s really good if it’s done right, and the crunch is nice.”

 

Skeptical, Quistis picked up one of her weird kiss-cake cookies and bit into it. It broke like a cracker instead of being light and chewy like a real kiss-cake should be, but then as the sweetness hit her tongue, she understood what Rinoa had said about the burned sugar taste. The smoky aroma, the slight bitterness, and the crunch made for something she’d never eaten before but immediately liked. Quistis's spirits lifted a fair bit.

 

_“Well, even if Seifer hates these, I’ll at least have made something I like. And that’s not bad at all.”_

 

The rest of the day was fine. Quistis tried her hand at piping ganache and found it just precise enough to appeal to her. Rinoa somehow made her kiss-cakes look even more like the night sky after she was done dusting and decorating them—fortunately, nothing on hers required precise drawing. And after filling his kiss-cakes, Zell had enough leftover lemon-orange curd that they could drizzle it all on yogurt, which put Quistis in a much better mood. 

 

So Quistis returned to the Garden in a spirit of peace and accomplishment, as well as her handmade kiss-cakes in a box—according to Ma, they needed to sit for another twenty-four hours before being given to people, something about the flavor developing. She set the box on her desk in  her room and after catching sight of herself in the mirror, decided that a shower was in order. There was still icing sugar streaking her clothes and somehow chocolate had ended up in her hair. 

 

A knock on the door interrupted her self-critique. “Come in!” 

 

The door slid open and Seifer came in, momentarily startling her; he looked intense about something. “Hey,” he said perfunctorily, looking her up and down. As his gaze then traveled around her room, he said, “I need to—fuck!”

 

“That’s… Blunt,” Quistis commented, not sure whether she was offended or amused. She ended up laughing as Seifer turned and ran down the hall, but when he didn’t come back, she wondered if something was wrong. Quistis debated going after him, but then decided that she was a bit too messy to go hunting after Seifer when she had no idea what he was on about or where he might be. 

 

_“Too bad he ran off. I can think of much nicer ways to get all this sweet stuff off me than showering, as long as he was game.”_

 

But Quistis had never been one for combining food and fornication, so imagining the moment longer than a few seconds sent her into giggles even as it pleasantly warmed her cheeks. It did make for some interesting dreams, however, as well as a resolution to never be alone with Seifer in Ma Dincht’s kitchen. That sweet woman and her spatulas did not deserve what Quistis’s mind had come up with. 

 

The next day was not the Spring Moon Festival, but the only day where the majority of their group would be around and also the last day before Quistis had another mission. Throughout the day she surprised her friends (except Zell and Rinoa) with her kiss-cakes and was not at all dismayed by them visibly hiding their apprehension about the way they looked, because the instant they bit into her spicy chocolate kiss-cakes, with their misleadingly mild white tops and bottoms, Quistis immediately found out which of her friends had any sort of tolerance for heat. And it was hilarious.

 

“Ooch! Ouch! Eeech!” Squealed Selphie, fanning her tongue, but then again she did pop an entire cake into her mouth at once and Quistis hadn’t had a light hand with the hot sauce. 

 

“It’s… Different,” said Irvine, who took a normal bite but turned red almost as soon as the spice hit his tongue. 

 

“DELICIOUS.”

 

“Yeah, this is awesome, ya know?” Said Raijin, as both he and Fujin ate their cakes in very small bites and practically wiggled with glee over the flavor. 

 

“What the _fuck,_ ” said Xu in horror, at first, before she took another bite, chewed thoughtfully, and then said, “Never mind. It’s good, I like it.” 

 

“Very creative,” said Dr. Kadowaki in approval, inhaling the smell of the kiss-cakes and smiling every time.

 

Nida was so happy to get kiss-cakes from anybody that he almost burst into tears, but the hug he gave Quistis was nothing but friendly so she gave him a warm hug back without reservation. 

 

And “…” said Squall, eyeing them suspiciously. 

 

“You don’t have to eat them,” said Quistis, amused at his wariness. But then again he was one of the last people she needed to deliver cakes to and he’d probably heard about the flavor from someone already.

 

“Sorry,” he said uncomfortably. “I don’t like spicy things. Or chocolate. Or sweets. I ate the ones Rinoa gave me and that was enough for a year.”

 

“She baked you _twelve_ kiss-cakes. You ate them all?”

 

“Yeah.” Come to think of it, Squall did look a little green. Quistis patted his shoulder in sympathy before relieving him of his extra kiss-cake burden, and she ate them herself as she went in search of Seifer. She had left him for last on purpose, mostly because if he really liked them, she wanted to be able to receive his appreciation privately. And if he hated them, well… Better not to let anyone else witness her humiliation, because even after all her newfound equanimity, Quistis was still sure that some part of her would be quite hurt if Seifer did not like her cooking. 

 

But he was annoyingly hard to find. Quistis looked for him in all the usual places and then resorted to asking people if they’d seen him, resolutely ignoring the speculative looks people gave her when she inquired. Eventually she followed a tip that led Quistis to the Garage, where she was just in time to see Seifer coming out of a car with a bag under his arm. 

 

“There you are,” she said, which made him flinch violently and whirl around. He also hid the bag behind his back, immediately piquing her curiosity and a hope that maybe he was making a little fuss too. “I have something for you.” 

 

“I, uh…” Seifer looked around the garage, his shoulders going up around his ears. They were alone so Quistis didn’t understand his caginess at first, but then it occurred to her that Seifer had an even greater hatred of making a vulnerable scene than she did. 

 

“How about I meet you at your room in, say, twenty minutes?”

 

He relaxed, nodding shortly, and then left without a word. Quistis wasn’t offended: she had a mystery to tide her over. She alternated between speculation and telling herself not to get her hopes up as she counted down the time to go, and when she went to Seifer’s room, there was a part of her imagining bouquets of roses, another part speculating on a whip-conditioning kit, and a third part of her absolutely convinced she was going to find Seifer standing naked in his room, arms akimbo, and a box over his dick. It might even be gift-wrapped. 

 

She wasn’t sure how to feel when Seifer let her into his room and everything looked like it usually did. Including him.

 

“What do you want?” He asked, which made Quistis sigh a bit.

 

“Well, I want to give you a Spring Moon present,” said Quistis, handing him the last of her little paper boxes. Trying to act like she wasn’t watching his face for all traces of emotion, she said diffidently, “You’re my last delivery of the day.”

 

“Lucky me,” he said with only a little dryness. Taking the box, he pulled the folded lid off and frowned at the kiss-cakes inside. Anxiety started curdling in Quistis’s stomach. 

 

“And before you tell me to take them back to the bakery, I can’t. I made those myself.”

 

At once Seifer’s eyes grew large and he looked at her with something verging on fear. “You… Made these?”

 

“Oh, don’t look so shocked,” said Quistis, now annoyed. Folding her arms, she said airily, “It wasn’t that hard. Or do you think I’m going to poison you?”

 

“Not on purpose,” said Seifer, looking back at the kiss-cakes. “You actually made these? Nobody’s ever… Thank you.”

 

Oh. He hadn’t been afraid of her cooking after all. Ashamed, Quistis said, “You’re welcome. I… Well. You’re worth the effort.”

 

Damn it! So much for her plan of making kiss-cakes for everyone so the one she actually was kissing wouldn’t think they were something special. But Quistis was more hopeful than apprehensive when Seifer picked up one of the kiss-cakes, took an appreciative smell, and then took a bite.

 

Immediately he spat it out. 

 

Quistis gasped, but before she could tear up or shout at him for being such an ungrateful, rude jackass, Seifer picked the bite apart and pulled out a long, very sharp shard of burned cookie. Glaring at it, he bit the fingernail-sized portion in two and then put the spat-out part back in his mouth. He did everything so fast and with such singleminded focus that he didn’t notice Quistis nearly sagging in relief. Or fighting an internal war of overreaction versus unspoken significance. 

 

“S’good,” he said after several thoughtful moments of chewing. “S’real good. Thanks.”

 

“You’re welcome,” said Quistis, now wondering if he had a mouthful of blood as well as sugar and chocolate. The idea that he’d willingly bleed for her kiss-cake was disturbingly touching.

 

He ate both cakes without sweating, cussing, or turning red and then went to his closet to pull out the white bag that he’d so awkwardly tried to hide earlier. The flash of a store name in gold lettering made Quistis realize Seifer had put in his own kind of effort too, and while he’d probably gone through a lot less agony than she had, he hadn’t been thinking about her any less. Trying not to let the rush of painful fondness escape from her chest to her cheeks (and failing; Seifer was startled by how her entire being softened), Quistis took the bag and pulled out the object inside, which was a nice hardcover book. 

 

“Happy Spring Moon.” 

 

“Thank you,” Quistis said, looking at the title. It was a collection of ghost stories, which pleased and mystified her in equal measure, especially when she began to leaf through it and saw the beautifully creepy illustrations within. This was certainly not a romantic present, but a present she would enjoy? Definitely. 

 

“I figured since you like creeping people out, you could get some new material,” said Seifer, which made Quistis laugh.

 

“Enjoying a ghost story now and then isn’t the same as creeping people out!”

 

“Zell almost cried when you pretended to be a ghost that one time,” said Seifer with relish. “It was the sexiest thing you’ve ever done.”

 

“Oh, so is _that_  why you enjoy antagonizing him so much?” And Quistis laughed again at the suddenly offended look on Seifer’s face.

 

Neither of them had anything to do except kill time and hide from overenthusiastic fan clubs, so despite all her intentions, Quistis ended up celebrating the Spring Moon with Seifer in a very typical sort of way. The sort of way that implied things were not just spur-of-the-moment or casual, that there were definite plans in the future, and that sooner or later, the talk they’d both been avoiding would have to happen. But that didn’t seem so terrifying at the moment. Seifer kissed her like he wanted to be with her for a long time. He touched her like it was their first time, except not behind some barely-tall bushes with near-discovery making things silent and rushes. Instead of the blazing fire she’d come to crave from him, there was something just as hot but more controlled and sustained, something that promised to keep her warm as long as she fed it too. 

 

It was perilously close to lovemaking, and Quistis didn’t want to be in love because something deep and vital inside her absolutely ached for it despite the danger. In this line of work, life was short and ended in terrible, brutal ways. Loving someone would always end in pain…

 

Eventually. 

 

Tonight she pretended otherwise. Tonight she believed something sweeter and more lasting. Tonight she slept like all the uncomfortable talks had gone well a long time ago and that there was nothing but contentment and happiness ahead. 

**Author's Note:**

> I never directly port a holiday if I can help it SO:
> 
> Iwate and Terrano are this universe's Tristan and Isolde plus a bit of Cowherd and Celestial Maiden. Iwate was a princess of Esthar and Terrano was a prince of Centra, and their love in a time of war was all kinds of forbidden. Terrano sailed back to Centra to make things right with his family and Iwate waited for him to return. But his ship met with disaster and Iwate was so heartbroken that the Moon itself wept with her, resulting in both Tear's Point and the folkloric reason for the Lunar Cry; every time the Moon turns red, it's Iwate rising up from her watery grave (she jumped off the cliff she had been waiting for Terrano on) and remembering he was dead and gone all over again. 
> 
> (for extra funsies, this is not even the only folkloric reason for the Lunar Cry that exists in this AU. If you read 'Break A Leg or Something', the play Seifer and Quistis are in is another mythological explanation.)
> 
> So naturally people make a big deal out of this and the original tragic epic has since been transformed into a million different permutations, and once enterprising businesspeople realized they could capitalize on love, they took the story and ran with both hands. Kiss-cakes are super loosely based on a historical food that both Esthar and Centra had at that point in time and fiddly enough that they could have been passed between royals as prestige presents. Same for chocolate, which is still rare and expensive in this world imho.


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